Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Bright Days are Doin Stuff

I was looking back at my blog wondering if I brought up a couple of subjects recently but nope it has been mostly Comics and Malifaux. Interestingly I wrote a little while ago that I was struggling to find the time to paint my minatures and then all the sudden I got a whole bunch of them painted up. I am still struggling with flesh tones, and undead flesh tones. Still! I have made a great deal of progress on painting up my stuff which is exciting. Of course because of that god damned sale I have two more boxed sets coming my way and an unpainted collet which sits around and MOCKS me! But I am okay with some of these things.

Alright I want to lay off...and by lay off make it look like it isn't the only thing I am writting about by writting more, but I still have some things to say about good old Malifaux. First and foremost I got to play Colette! I didn't win. That is okay though that first game session was more about me taking her out for a spin and seeing what she can do. The result? Well I made a whole fist full of mistakes, oh so many, and my opponent did some pretty smart things as a result we ended the game at or around turn 5 with both of our crews more or less dead. He used Ramos, and Ramos is now scary. He was always sort of lackluster but his new Totem gives him a free book. This means now only needs an 8 to sumnon a spider and a 7 for an electrical creation. In retrospect I should of killed that fucking totem. In future games it goes to the top of my hit list because thanks to that totem by turn 2 Ramos had 2 spider swarms to go along with Joss and Johan. The next thing he did was he kept his figgures well covered. Essentially I couldn't base Ramos without taking a hit from either Joss, Johan, or a Spider Swarm. Now the girls may be able to move around but far to often I am going to need leave someone hanging for at least one enemy activation before I can switch them out for something safer. Also, Spider Swarms have a pretty devistating threat range. Still being able to make 2 attacks from 9 inches away sucks, and all the rough terrain in the world isn't going to stop them. Under estimating those spiders was how I lost my first preformer. I lost the second one by underestimating Johan who when standing next to Joss becomes one of the best figgures in the whole fucking game. I have 7CB oh and look Brutal triggered cause I am a cock teehee. RAWR, never loaning that figgure out again. Yeah that was the worst part it was my Joss that was used to terrorize me.

Now onto mistakes I made. One Coryphees or however the hell you spell it, are amazing. They really really are. However, the first thing I did was Duet them up and let them rip. This is a mistake 4 general ap actions that can be split against two different targets at 6cb is better than 3 general ap actions at one target. Oops. The main reason to duet them up are those free healing flips, and when you absolutely postivily need to hit someone in the face. That is when you go for it. Otheerwise it is better to let them be in two places at once causing havok wherever they go. It is I promise.

Next I under estimated how awesome Manniquins are. They are awesome. At armor three, object 2 they don't go down easy. Even to the kids who ignore armor. They also count as showgirls. This is something that I just didn't freaking realize. So I can teleport them into trouble then just activate the preformer who will trigger the link and zoom them out of trouble. That is just freaking glorious. It does however, bring me to my next point.

At the MINIMUM I need two mechanical doves fluttering around. Many of Collet's more potentially devistating combos work with the aid of mechanical doves. I haven't quite gotten all the logistics down just yet as she can be a logistical nightmare. She is someone you really need to plan ahead with. Essentially she has all the same problems as the Victorias only times 5. A few more games under my belt and I'll be good to go.

To go back to my previous point. The challange to all of this is to get Beautiful Cloths off. Man if I could of gotten that spell off once or twice I could of done some beautiful things. The biggest obsticle to overcome is the fact that the manniquns are slow. They are also tuffer than they look but they are by no means invincible. Oh well something to contemplate.

The nice thing about her is that she has Cassandera. Now if there was ever a figure made of both win and awesome it is her. She is a god damned tank and she is more than capable of zooming about the table top doing whatever it is that needs to be done.

Now the main reason why I lost the game is that I played it more like I had the slaughter objective instead of the "Dick with 4 pieces of terrain" objective. Like I said I wanted to see what they could do, and that meant more than just zooming all over the table. I now know they can do that. Now that I got her basics down it is time to really see what she is capable of. Like I said by the end of the game I had taken down two spider swarms, Joss and maybe Johan. So if I actually had Slaughter I was more than halfway there. I am really excited to play more of her, this time more as a trying to win senario and less of a testing of strength. And I am hungry so this shit is done. I might write more later though just because I can.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Who has Rising Powers? This guy!

Who didn't find out about the 50% off sale until the day after Rising Powers arrived? Yeah this guy. Oh well.

So I've had it for a couple of days now and while I was hanging out with Sasha at werk I spent some serious quality time with it. So I kinda wanna do all sorts of things. Right now I want to form the canadian order of masochists. Of course I don't really know who to see about that, so I am going to go back to this blog entry. Yay!

So lets get some general impressions out of the way.

Winners:

Ramos: For all intents and purposes Ramos is the Arcanists. Personally I think they should just take Rasputina, Marcus, and Colette and make them into a new fraction and just let Ramos do his own thing. The henchmen is specifically attuned to Ramos, two of the new guild constructs can be hired by him, a ballin horseman, and all sorts of new toys that are a part of his faction. Of all the masters old and new he got by far the most love.

Neverborn Faction: Man oh man the whole neverborn faction won out. Just about all the nightmares pull double duty as Woes giving Pandora quite a stylized boost. Lillith's crew in no way what so ever lacked power. However, now in the new book he crew gains some much needed personality. This is great because as a master I LOVE Lillith bot conceptually and stat wise but...well you know generic demon things. Now, or well as soon as the damn things are released I will totally be grabbing her.

Gremlins: They weren't paticularly viable in the main book. There were certain senarios they excelled at and then there were many senatios they couldn't hope to win. That's all different now. This is the section I haven't read very much of, because it frankly doesn't quite interest me. However, I am glad they got the boost they deserve.

The Encounter System: The game exploded from 5 possible encounters to 13. That is awesome. The Schemes though, now that is where it is at. Every faction gets a new specific scheme and every master gets a specific scheme. Therefore there is now no excuse what so ever for us to be in a situation there I am choosing the same schemes as my opponent. What's better is that if we happen to choose the same encounter then the encounter itself changes which means there are closer to 26 encounters. Also unpopular encounters/schemes have been tweeked specifically both Slaughter and Assasinate which is something that gets a pretty damn joyous hooray from me.


Loosers:

Nothing is perfect.

Marcus: Poor Marcus. He has some new options to choose from but none of them are specifically his, they are all things that are lying around in other factions. Also, most of the new beasts are kinda crappy. The Guild Hound is a totem, the rouge necromancy just doesn't seem to fit well and I think he would honestly be better off just getting another tiger, and the Raptor isn't to great. I like Marcus too. He doesn't quite have the same wiz bang explosive coolness as a lot of the other masters and I really hopped that he would of gotten a much needed shot in the arm. The Shikome is nice though. Thous things look amazing and I think they would be brilliant if used in pairs.

The Viktorias: Man the thing that used to make the Viktorias viable is the fact that they were so manuverable. They could get that alpha strike off and then retreat leaving a puddle of dead enemies in their wake. Now though? I mean Colette can run circles around her, Kirai can run circles around them, and there are just generally more tools to catch them. This would be fine but they didn't really get any fun tools to compensate for that which is lame :(.

The Awesome:

Lord Chompy Bits is made of win and victory.

Lucius Governor's Secretary is made of win and awesome. Seriously, I love everything about this guy from his background, to his crew, to his concept art. I want him in the worst way. I even want to dress like him, powdered wig and all, and I can't wait to use the lawyers. Also there really needs to be a scheme that involves killing all the lawyers but that is mostly...holy crap as a neverborn I could kidnap them. That's even better! Seriously, though want.

Unexplained Connection. There is a Neverbourn model named Coppelius. He steals eyeballs, which he then uses for all sorts of things. He is kind of awesome. He can spawn lil smaller nightmare thingies called Alps, and he can Paralyze with his melee strike and he has melee expert. In short he is awesome and scary, and is one of the most alien figgures they have come up with. The Unexplained connection rule states that he can be hired by the new guild master named C Hoffman. I haven't read all of the fluff yet but in the superficial description of Coppelius or Hoffman there is not even a clue as to why this connection exists.

This is awesome to me. This is awesome on the same basic scale of the old warhammer 40k "red makes it go fasta rule". It is one of the most favor filled things I have seen in a long time. Malifaux is a world of mysteries and strange wonders. This is just one of those things, and that is exciting. I mean Coppelius and Hoffman don't seem to have any synergism what so ever between them. I kind of want to get Hoffman just so that I can exparament with Coppelius. I love this game.


So now then Wyrd certainly ratcheted up the complexity of the rules. I mean two of the four masters, I have no idea how I would even start to go about playing them. Holy shit Colette only barely makes sense she doesn't have a weapon she is all spells and hope. I am really looking froward to plunking her down on the battle field just to see what will happen. At the moment I am positive that I am going to be suffering more than a few crushing defeats before I figgure out how to use her correctly. She also seems to be super unforgiving, at only 6 wounds most of the figures in the game can kill her in one hit. Fortunatly she seems to spam soulstones, still it is something I need to actually just sit down and play before I am going to be able to figgure out what the hell it is I am doing with her.

Kirai wasn't even someone I was paticularly interested in playing until I found the 50
% off sale thanks to James. Ergo I now have to deal with the fact that I have a Kirai boxed set incoming. Oh well, at first I am pretty sure that I'll just be letting Jame's use my extra Senchin for awhile. The more I look into her though the more interested I become. Spirits are just plain old hard to hit let alone kill, so with that in mind I am becoming more and more interested in playing her.

Moving on a bit I wanna talk about the Henchmen a bit. Three of the 5 henchmen have pretty fleshed out, solid crews, specifically, the guild, the arcanists, and the outcasts. The guild henchman I already wrote about and I am very specifically interested in playing him. SO COOL. Then there is Kaeris who actually has a huge set of options when it comes to a crew including the mighty Joss. I mean with Kaeris and Joss you really don't need a crew those two will mop up all on their own. I don't really have a whole lot of interest in her as a figgure but I have a feeling I am going to be seeing her placed across from me quite a bit because she is pretty metal. Then lastly there is Von Schill. Von Schill has by far the largest potential crew of any of the henchmen. He can hire any mercinaries he wants which means Ronin, bishop, and Misaki, as well as his own Freikorps. I like the Freikops conceptually and I LOVE Von Schill as a character but he looks rather dull. His crew is shooty in nature, far more shootyer than stabbity, he can hire all sorts of snipers which saddens me as they are almost as good as hans, and the specialist and librarians are interesting but nothing really jumps out at me. I might pick them up and use them with my Viktorias but in a world of undead hookers, demonic teddy bears, leviticus, and coffin surfing cowboys the Freikorps just seem a bit to average.

I love Von Schill as a charecter though and at the very least I will be grabbing him and swaping him out with Bishop.

The remaining two Henchmen Collodi and Molly don't really have fleshed out crews. Collodi does seem like he would be lots and lots of fun in a Zorida list, and I am postive Lord Chompy Bits could make use of him which is cool. However, I think once his crew gets properly fleshed out he is going to see a fuckton of play cause he really is cool as shit.

Molly, is a henchman but I don't really know why. I kinda wish she was just her own person like Sybelle or some of the others. Though when it comes to a support character you can't go wrong with Molly and if you are running a fear bomb type list with Seamus she is positively an asset. I am truely excited to see what they have instore for her crew, and I can't wait to watch her antics on the battle field. I know they couldn't fit everything into one book and I am okay with that. I really am. It is just that the two henchmen I am most excited about got themselves the short stick. Oh well I am going home.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Malifaux! A little of this and a little of that

Well I am in the mood to write about Malifaux because I wanna. Also because it is nice. I really really like that game far more than I should. I kinda want to try playing a brawl where I get to use two masters. I can imagine a Seamus/McMourning team up and it would be just hilarious. There would be prostitutes and dogs EVERYWHERE. Literally there would be nowhere to turn without being in the charge range of some annoying thing. Actually, that isn't how it would work out at all but I like to pretend.

So my order with Wyrd hasn't shipped yet :( I don't think it will until at least the 20th which is fine by me. By then I will have put moar money in the bank and everything will be fine. I really want the new book, moreso than I want Colette. In fact I am thinking of canceling my order and remaking it so I just get the book. The reason being that as much as I want Colette I've always wanted Lillith.

Lillith is a beast. At 8 defense and 7 attack dealing with her is just a whole mess of problems on a pretty wide scale. Then you factor in the fact that she does 3/4/6 damage with a built in plus flip and you get the feeling you might be in love. Oh and she is fast meaning she gets a delicious 3 actions for her to spend in any way she chooses. She is also freaking Lillith and how could you not want her? Oh yeah her crew. Statistically her crew is amazing. Absolutly no complaints there. I mean Seamus and McMourning can kill just about every figgure in the game and their crews excist to keep the heat off of them until they get around to laying down some murder sauce. Lillith can kill Seamus and McMourning along with any other figure in the game and so can 2/3rds of her crew. It is just that...well they are boring. Essentially her crew just consistis of winged demons. Really winged demons? In a game where I can have a giant teddy bear of death, coffin surfing cowboys, undead hookers, mechanical spiders, the ronin, evil children, the winged demons just seem so boring. They seem especially boring even if the big ones have a special move called rip in half.

However, in the new book Lillith is getting a nice sweet shot in the arm in the form of Nephellim twins who seem to have complimentary abilities and...well you know personality. Now that is exciting. Combine them with some dogs that can attack anywhere through a forest and well one or two winged deamons who may be boring but effective and we have a recipie for JOY and this is something I am excited about.

So I think that is something that is going to be pretty close to happening.

It will happen after Collett though because I am very much interested in getting a ticky to play, complicated master who can do all sorts of stupid bullshit. After all Seamus is pretty straight foward to play and the Victorias actually have quite a few tricks of their sleaves but having an insane bullshit master will be fun.

And with that I need to go and do stuff and things.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Plucking up the flaming sword that bars eden

So hi. We haven't been talking much have we? I've gone from writing one to three enteries a week down to less than one, and now when I do write it is about games that only I care about. Sorry about that. I am not leaving you for another activity I swear. I still love you my little blog, I promise. It is just that, well some things are going to have to change. Sorry about that kiddo but sometimes these things just sort of happen.

It is just that, well, I've been looking around more and more and I've reached an intolerable level of frustration. More and more I see people around me who's lives are ruled by fear and ignorace. People who are privileging their randomized ideas about things over factual information from reputable sources. People who would rather hide from the world than deal with any part of it. I look our over things and it seems like we are entering into a new dark ages.

I mean jesus, we have people who are refusing to innoculate their children against diseases that will kill them because there is a 2% chance that something bad might happen to them. Actually I think it is less than two percent but you know how it is. People who think that paying 10,000 dollars to be put under for a surgery is just fine and that poor people don't need any insurance. People who can't handle the fact that we have a black president who is trying his damnedest to change our country using a system that he believes in, even though many of us have long ago ceased to believe in it. I may not agree with all of his choices but I do respect the amount of activity he has managed to pump out. It goes on and on though.

I look out over the tea party and it is almost like they want someone to stand up and shout that, "Yes everything is bad, the world is falling apart, that doom will befall us all and that christianity will be whipped off the face of the earth in a wave of commie china wrath." They want everything to be bad and there to be both blood and pain present.

Net neutrality is under attack. evan wanted me to write a blog on the topic but I don't really feel the need to. Essentially, net neutrality means that ISP's are not allowed to give preferencial treatment to certain web pages over other ones. So no matter if I am going to twitter, a white supreamacist forum, an animal porn site, or this blog they will all be alloacted an equal amount of bandwidth by you isp. What companies want to do is to change that. This way certain sites can pay money to load faster, or they can choke the bandwidth to certain sites they don't agree with like everything in the .xxx domain. The arguments for it are freedom of speech. I mean look around you, the internet is pretty much one of the last things that functions like I think it should. Anyone can say anything they want for free and people are free to come and go as they choose. Little people have a voice and it is loud enough so that news organizations had to give them a name, the bloggers.

The arguments agains? Well pretty much it boils down to, "But we can make more money this way :(" Hopefully net neutrality will survive but I don't know.

So here we are. But I am not in this place that I just outlined above. I am somewhere else. I know that because of math and science that cosmologists are reasonably certain that they are able to predict what the universe was like 6 seconds after the big bang happened. Can you imagine that? We pretty much know what happened right after the start of the universe. My computer that I am typing this blog entry right now is more powerful than the computers used to preform the first moon landing. In fact if I were to go back in time and to tell the people who organized the moon landing that not even 100 years later something smaller than a text book could connect wirelessly to a web of compleatly user generated information for only 120 bucks I doubt they would believe me. Hell we lauched the moon shuttle using vaccume tubes. Don't fuck with things.

Because of the internet I can listen to music from all over the world, easily and for free and right now I am not even talking about piracy, I am saying that it is something that is just doable thanks to things like youtube and pandora.

We live in a fantastic age where so much is possible and so much of it is beauitful and instead I see so many people dead set on making it as shitty as humanly possible and I am not sure how I feel about that. I mean we can put a man on the moon but black people are still killed for no more reason than the color of their skin. In the 80's america did enough cocaine to create a new band of terrorism, called narco terrorism. We created men who ran countries through fear and power. We even made one man so powerful that he kidnapped 12 american journalists so that his government would build him a prison. We beat this problem through education, coordination of law enforcement agencies, and cooperation with the forgien governments. Now in mexico we are faced with a situation that is actually FAR less dangerous and yet we have people screaming about how it is INSURMOUNTABLE.

I see a world of hope through education and wisdom when so many other people see a world of fear and ignorance.

I say no more.

But what can I do? Go forth and educate the masses? Not my style or theirs. To them I am cracker nibbling liberal. So what?

I've decided the best thing I can do is to game. Yeah that most certainly sounds counter intuitive but hear me out. The one thing that adults don't do nearly enough is dance. The other thing adults don't do nearly enough is play games. I am not talking my complex geek games that take up all my time and much of my energy. But you know simple things like sharades, card games, maybe risk, things like that. The thing is that you can learn more from playing a game with someone for an hour than you could through years of conversation. You can tell who is honerable, who cheats, and how willing are they to have just plain old fun.

The most fun I have ever seen a group of adults have is when they were geeking out.

I am talking about good natured honest fun too. The trick is to walk the line between what I want to do and escapism. What I want to do is to be keenly aware of the problems of the world around me. I want to understand the challanges that face the people in charge, and I want to be relativly informed about what the rest of the world is doing and why. I want to have a historical perspective, and look my fears in the face. Then despite all of these things I still want to be able to laugh, enjoy a nice game of malifaux or mutants and masterminds with my friends, and to ultimatly love my life.

I don't want to become a beaten down shell of a person who can only spit venom, and see the worst in every situation hoping the world burns down around me so I get to be right. I don't want to become one of those people who fanatically cling to my petty material possestions all the while shouting down new social reforms to help thous who actually need it.

In order to do this though, I need to play. Sorry.

Gaming isn't a panecia. I know. Spending more time at TBS has taught me this if nothing else.
It is what I need though. It is the way I enjoy spending time with my friends, and it is what keeps me laughing and living in spite of it all. Things aren't so bad. They really aren't. I think people want to believe that everything is hopeless so they won't have to do anything, a bizzare form of denile or something like that. I don't think anything is hopeless. Not yet at least.

So for awhile I will be writting lots more about Malifaux, mutants and masterminds, and anything else that interests me and that will be okay. These are amazing times and I will enjoy them no matter how much anyone else wants me to be as miserable and scared as they are.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Pirannas are a Tricky Species

And if they are hard you wouldn't be able to imagine how hard it is to balance time sometimes. I have several time consuming hobbies all wanting my atension and a job that sucks up far more time than it should both on and off the clock. The on the clock I can sort of deal with but I haven't been very thrilled with the way I have been spending my time off the clock as of late. For example I just dicked around for an hour. I checked face book, kicked twitter around, read a thread on rpg.net that I don't care about, started into space...and you know just crap. Now granted I was trying to work up the urge to work on Mutants and Masterminds and I am nursing a tiny bullshit cold but neither of these things are excuses. I should of moved onto reading something I am not going to buy, or just gone home or something like that. Not just wasting time. In all seriousness this is something that has been happening more and more as of late where I will sit down with the intension of doing something and I just end up doing nothing instead, and I mean literally nothing. It isn't something I am used to and I don't really like it. Still recognition is the first step twords reversal. I think a big thing that is causing the dead time is that I am undergoing a shift in how I spend my time. I am still doing Mutants and Masterminds and people seem to be enjoying themselves with that. I have backed off Dwarf Fortress ever so slightly and I am now more focused on Touhou. I have gone from Dungeon Fighters to Kingdom of Loathing, and I have been reading less non fiction and more fiction. Once things settle down a bit I should become a little better at keeping my time well managed and getting from one activity to the next more fluidly.

I really want to start painting my malifaux minatures but the problem I am having is that paint is expensive and it always comes in larger quantities than I need. Much larger quantities. Seamus and the VIctorias require radically different paint schemes, and I really want to dress Seamus in a glittery black coat because that idea just makes me happy all over. I also want to start building terrain but the first step to that is to get tools and tools are spensive and blah blah blah. I mean I could of bought lots of tools and materials but I instead am going to buy a collette box set because...well you know she is made of awesome. Also handily enough Collette's pointing needs coincide with Seamus' painting needs so I am hoping that buying paints won't seem so absollutly hateful when I need it for more than 8 figgures. I suppose I could go to tbs and scum off of someone else's paint but that isn't how I roll, never have. This is partly because I am an idiot.

I am really excited about making terrain though. The first piece I want to get together is a hanging tree...for reasons that have nothing to do with Jack Daw. I also just sort of want to get things together in general. Building terriain is actually a lot of fun and not something I ever got to do enough of. I wish I still had my Dremmel power tool. That thing was down right handy. I wonder how much they cost...HEY not that much! I need to clean my house a little bit before I go buying Balsa wood and tools to make it all work out. Being able to play with forest terrain, and some of the other feature is going to be a lot of fun. When I build it though it needs to be sturdy otherwise it is never going to survive transportation. Speaking of transportation I need to start looking into a better way of lugging my figgures around.

Figgure transportation is EXPENSIVE jesus fuck. I saw this one really snazzy bag for 80 bucks. 80 bucks for a bag I haven't even spent that much on the damn game yet....wait no...okay not much more than 80 bucks. Yes yes I am sure the custom cut foam trays are very nice, and the logo on the bag, and the deck holders are neat. Still though that is a lot of monies. There are smaller options but then I run the risk of not being able to carry everything. Part of the joy of Malifaux is that I can have a variety in who I play. Oh well what the hell. For now keeping them in the boxes they came in seems to be good enough. Still it is going to be a problem sooner than later, especially when I branch off to the Jack Daw fear bomb technique. The fear bomb is one of those things that either works fabulously well or totally not. It is something I wanna try out though, as I think it will really put Seamus front and center on the battle field instead of off to the side where he is being all scary. He is capable of ripping apart an entire crew all on his own. The trick is getting him to do that and not killed by a counter attack. Right now I've been using punk zombies and rotten belles to that effect but seeing everyone run in fear would work too.

If I do that I might want to consider the totem. Being able to cast two faces of death would be hilarious. Anyway Books a Million is closing soonish so I should leave. I think I am going to make a solid comitment to getting some M&M shite done. And with that I am off.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Blackest Night

So I've been meaning to write this blog forever now. But I haven't. I am not really sure why but I just haven't really gotten around to it. Of all the major comic book events I've ever read I think I like this one the second most (first going to Final Crisis). However, it is the first major comic book event that I procured all of the side/suplimentary material for. As a result I have 7 hard back books that streach over all aspects of the DC universe. In many ways the Blackest Night is something that has been building in one way or another since the Infinite Crisis event which happened just before the Sinestro Corps War. Essentially, the theme of the Infinte Crisis is that life in the DC universe is really fucked up. Super Heroes die, families get killed in insanely awful ways, and general day to day crime fighting has huge risks involved. Now granted no one made that Tigra chick leap at Superboy prime so when he punched her head off acting suprised really isn't going to get you very far. However, once we release ourselves from the reality of the situation and revert back to comic book logic then, yeah the fact that she got her head punched off is really fucked up, the same with psycho pirate getting his face pushed out of the back of his head, or what happened to Kyle's wife. I mean jesus.

The Blackest Night event itself served as a massive reflection on the nature of death, grief, mourning, absoultion, and nearly indestructable superzombies punching the crap out of highly destructable super people. What more can a guy like me ask for? It isn't much really.

The strange thing about the event is while it contained insane amounts of action it was also very slow paced at the same time. When I said eariler that it served as a meditation on death I meant it. So there would be times where fight scenes would be driven to a halt while once charecter confronts his dead parents/children/lovers and is forced to work through the associated guilt that comes along with it. I liked this. I liked how the whole event forced both the charecters and the reader to realize how terrible some of these deaths were. For a long time DC has been criticised as being Death Comics. They have a callous lack of respect for low level super heros and villians and they tend to die with disturbing frequency. The teen titans book for examle became an endless string of deaths and sadness for so long that people began leaving the book because it just simply wasn't any fun to read. Also the fact that it was the TEEN titans didn't help any.

The death thing was cool but I'll leave it alone for a bit. Right now I want to talk about the ressurections. In many ways those make dealing with death so much worse than if death was forever. Looking back over the string of ressurections starting with the Hawk people on down the line it is almost impossible to not maintain some sort of hope that dead loved one X who got her ass stuffed in a refrigerator won't walk back through the door someday with a smile and a crazy story. Charecerters who have been through the entire grieving process now suddenly find themselves living with the Flash again, everyone trying to imagine that it didn't happen and ultimatly failing. If there is anything more arbitrary than death in the real world it is the randomness of the resurecctions in the DC universe. When Supergirl was faced with someone or other in Black Lantern form she just assumed it was a run of the mill resurrection and something went wrong somewhere, something that could be fixed though that was the key.

Ultimatly the book represented the ultimate fears of the DC universe, not death so much but ressurection. At the end of the series after the white light brought back a whole butt ton of people, those who still had dead parents and lovers are forced to wonder why is it that they have been left out? Why did only some of the dead heros come back and not all of them? Still the DC Universe just got a serious population boost in terms of super powered folks running around. Now comes the question of are they going to learn from all of this and stop killing each other? I hope so.

More and more often comics are starting to talk about the good old days where it was all sweetness and light. Hell in the punisher war zone (of all places) there was a love letter to silver age senibilities in the form of Stilt Man's Funeral a funeral that the punisher bombed marking the end of my interest in that writter's run on the book. The entirety of the Blackest Night was focused around dead people forcing the living to look back on how fucked up the last few years have been. There are others. However, can this cat be put back in the bag? Or will DC go back to funding underpreforming books with an endless parade of deaths and horrible tragedy? I hope not. I hope this marks a change in the company's line up. We will see though. December the Brightest Day trade comes out and I will be looking foward to it.

Malifaux

So I wanted to start a malifaux play journal type thing. Mostly because I want to but also because it will help log ideas, mistakes I've made, and stuff like that. It is strange most times when I play a game I know exactly what it is I am going to be doing and I make it happen...or loose. As a result my turns go by fairly quickly. However, there are moments in Malifaux where I will sit there with the full realization that I have no freaking idea what it is I am going to do next. Sometimes, that is unusually awesome. So last game happened it was Seamus (me) vs Sonnia Crid.

We both got Assasinate, we both chose to body gaurd our Masters, and we both choose to have hold out. Briefly the way the game went was first turn I spent moving guys fowards and getting them into possition under cover. The next turn I spent moving some figgures up as a distraction and killing Sam Hopkins who I view as a greater threat than Sonnia Crid. Crid moved fowards and turned one of my rotten bells into another witchling stalker. At the end of the turn I based Crid with my Punk Zombie.

Third turn Punk Zombie activated flurry after he tried to cheap past my initiative flip and failed. I Flurry Sonnia which leaves her with one HP and two soulstones. Then the witchling stalker kills the punk zombie who turns around and kills sonnia crid. On a side note it would of been much funnier to kill the Witchling stalker and have Crid taken out by the explosion but the stalker has to much HP. Sybell and a Belle managed to kill the new stalker and some other inconsequential stuff happened.

Turn four my oppoent took out the executioner to play. I used Seamus to rip that fat basterd apart with a sort of frenzied brutality that I have come to expect out of my favorite mad hatter, and then at that point we decided to call it. I had 4 vp and he could only get a max of two so off Sonnia went crying wee wee wee all the way home.

Once again I was supprised by how manuverable Seamus's crew really is. Having the belles move up to 12" in an amazing boost, as well as their 13 inch lure range. The combination of the two means that I can sack a belle and potentially drag a figure out of hiding and into the waiting arms of either a punk zombie or Seamus. I went without a Convict gunner this game and I think that was for the best. Sure sure the gunner is undeniably good, and sacrificing a Belle to move a figgure or two into the LOS of the gunner would be great for making rapid fire happen, but at the end of the day the raw killing power of that third punk zombie really made up for it. Since I had such a figgure advantage and since Belles can come back I could afford to play a more risky game. It worked out pretty well this time but I am unsure of how it will work again. I am pretty sure that my oppoenent is now suitably terrified of Punk Zombies, especially after one ganked his master. So we will see.